Misused: No Periods Period

If people aren't up to YKTT Wing all the different subtropes, we can at least remove all the current bad content, and stick it on a discussion page or something.

Well, yeah, you would expect this to come up about once a month.

We need a thread for required YKTT Ws, apparently, since otherwise a TRS that decides "take this to YKTTW" is never going to work.

...is it just me who doesn't think this trope is actually being misused?

The trope isn't "periods never happen", it's "periods never happen except to facilitate these specific plots". So, as long as the examples are all of the specific plots, they're not aversions, they're just the trope played straight. An actual aversion of this trope would be a female character having an incidental period during an episode which is otherwise not related to her being on her period.

I agree with you, but that doesn't mean we can't go with the top crowner option. It just means we need to rewrite a lot of the examples a little bit rather than deleting them outright.

^^ The page contains a great many examples of periods outside the listed plots. And elsewhere on the site, people wick to it simply for any mention of a period.

But the real misuse comes because this article was originally, as the laconic still states, "Fictional women never menstruate." The current description, categorizing all ways fictional women do menstruate, responded to many aversions to this supposed trope.

Further, I say that any article taking the form "X never happens except Y" should not have "Y" has an example. If we want to track Y, we should simply call the trope "Y." A example of X would be "If makes perfect sense for X to happen in this situation, but it does not."

Any progress here?

One fundamental problem with both trope and description is, that there are a lot of works ,which never mention menstruation for the simple reason, that it have nothing to do with the story. Works about space battles, idol concerts, school clubs etc. are first and foremost about that and more often than not leave most basic human things to imagination, be it menstruation, eating or sleeping. And of course, there are all sort of works for kids which never mention menstruations either, since the audience doesn't knew what it is anyway.

There has been some progress. I launched All Periods Are PMS a while ago.

I think the issue with periods used to be an author never mentioned them when writing, ever, even in scenes where you'd think the problem would come up, because it wasn't 'polite'. (An older book that comes to mind is The Family Name, where the high school lady lead starts swimming for physical therapy and weight loss, then winds up on the swim team.) Things have changed, and this trope is nowhere near as prevalent as it once was.

I think part of the problem may be (and I mean no insult by this) is that younger submitters may be more familiar with examples using subversions or aversions rather then playing the trope straight.

One suggestion would be to change the name of the of the trope. ("Never Ever Period" crosses my mind) to discourage potholing. There are a few straight examples among the clutter.

Another would be to see if current aversions (and possibly some subversions) could be placed on existing or new pages. (If they aren't there already.) Periods being linked to transformations, powers, or the like could use a 'Magical Cycle' page. That would probably require two sections, one for when the period's an advantage, and one where it's a disadvantage.

On the other hand, periods that interrupt something -or 'something'- could go on the appropriate page.

There's also some examples that read as 'Period Affects the Plot'. 'Sci Fi/Magic Cycle Control' (or influence) exists as well. As well as 'Fantastic Culture, Periods'. And 'Tampon Embarrassment' for both sexes. (Although that sounds like part of a larger trope, I think?)

Many of the aversions are quite good. They just need to be on the right pages, new or old, and not in a trope that is dedicated to tales where the women have part of their biology shut off or not mentioned for the the 'comfort' of the reader.

edited 18th Dec '12 2:58:38 AM by Candi

Bumping this, since I wanted to start the Period Problems trope - has anybody an idea on a description? Both the crowner and the thread don't have one.

What's our status regarding the dead trope of period being an unmentionable thing? You know, the reason why even tampons and pads had to be marketed as "feminine hygiene" for "those times when you want to be fresher".

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